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More "Platitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... causerie—pleasant, genial talk about a most interesting man. Easy and conversational as the tone is throughout, no important fact is omitted, no valueless fact is recalled; and it is entirely exempt from platitude and ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Long's hat was dislodged and hurled to the ground. In his shocked sympathy for his friend, Henley was bewildered by noting that Dixie was actually subduing a laugh, her rebellious lips covered with her white-gloved hand. Long secured his hat, drew himself up, and repeated his platitude. ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... week marks an epoch in the history of the world is to state a platitude. Nevertheless, it is worth stating, and for us who are lucky enough to be at Rheims during this week there is a solid satisfaction in the idea that we are present at the making of history. In perhaps only a few years to come the competitions of this ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... until some hours afterwards. I was informed of it, however, before I reached the town, on my way homeward. To say that I was inexpressibly shocked and grieved would merely be to repeat a very stupid platitude, and to say that I was a human being. I had learned to love poor little Charlie almost as dearly as I loved my own children. And his father—what would be ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... French provincial towns can be as dull as dulness itself could require. It is in the somewhat unjust mood which is commonly begotten of disillusion that Sterne discovers the cause of his ennui in "the eternal platitude of the French character," with its "little variety and no originality at all." "They are very civil," he admits, "but civility itself so thus uniform wearies and bothers me to death. If I do not mind I shall grow most stupid ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... that one who talks thus is no better than a dead man; and when he sets out on some trusty platitude concerning women's sphere and ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... her open throat and into her shirtwaist. It was as if the platitude merged with the very corpuscles of a blush that sank down into ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... in authorship which is common to most growing writers, when the style is "overlanguaged," and when it plunges wildly through the "sandy deserts of rhetoric," or struggles as if it were having a personal difficulty with Ignorance and his brother Platitude. It was capitally said of Chateaubriand that "he lived on the summits of syllables," and of another young author that "he was so dully good, that he made even virtue disreputable." Hawthorne had no such literary vices ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... him reproachfully and to say, with its essential finish: "How could you promise anything so base; how could you pass your word to mutilate and dishonour me?" The alterations demanded by Mr. Locket were impossible; the concessions to the platitude of his conception of the public mind were degrading. The public mind!—as if the public HAD a mind, or any principle of perception more discoverable than the stare of huddled sheep! Peter Baron felt that it concerned him to determine ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... devoted to the planning of the children's room, may give the impression that the room is of more importance than the librarian. It is a platitude, however, to say that the ideal children's librarian, with every material condition against her, will do a thousand times more than the ideal room with the wrong person in it. The qualifications necessary to make the right sort of a disciplinarian are, many of them, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... is brought out in the second quotation—that profits directly produced by the war are not limited to the period of the war. This again is really axiomatic, being only another form of the platitude that it takes longer to construct than to destroy: but it means that even a short war of sufficient intensity will ensure a long period of profits, and therefore it noticeably aggravates the conclusions to which I ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... sentence: "The cause is that feathers doe possess upward attractions." During four hundred years preceding Lord Verulam philosophers would have flown by aid of a broomstick. Bacon himself would have merely parried the problem with a platitude! ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... were ever the first to defend a man, You who had always the money to lend a man, Down on his luck and hard up for a V! Sure, you'll be playing a harp in beatitude (And a quare sight you will be in that attitude)— Some day, where gratitude seems but a platitude, You'll find your latitude, Barney McGee. That's no flim-flam at all, Frivol or sham at all, Just the plain—Damn it all, Have one with me! Here's luck and more to you! Friends by the score to you, True to the core to you, ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... hast ever read what's writ in holy pages, How blessed the peace-makers are, God's children of the ages? Perhaps you think the promise sweet was nothing but a platitude; 'Tis clear that you have no ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... it is high on the hill, with the sparkling water of the harbour close by, one can easily argue that good has come out of the evil. But as one mutters the platitude the Canadian who drives the car points to the long, tramless hill that connects the place with the heart of the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... had settled down in Venice with Pagello—and with all the family, all the Pagello tribe, with the brother, the sister, to say nothing of the various rivals who came and made scenes. It was the vulgar, ordinary platitude of an Italian intimacy of this kind. In spite of everything, she continued ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... pages of analysis and of comment, the long descriptions and the nervous pathology, are omitted by Miss Mayor's method, which is all for the swift movement and against the temptations to delay which obstruct those whose eyes are not upon life; she condenses her opportunities for psychology and platitude into a couple of shrewd lines and goes on with her story, keeping her freshness and the reader's interest unabated. The method is to draw the central figure rapidly past a succession of bright lights, keeping the lights various and ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... feel tainted with savagery and enjoying a vicarious lust, when I smile at the oft-repeated tale of the poor tiger in Dore's picture that hadn't got a Christian. On the other hand, it tickles me immensely to behold a plethoric commonplace Briton roar himself purple with impassioned platitude at a political meeting; but I perceive that all my neighbours take him with the utmost seriousness. Again, your literary journalist professes to wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is the dullest lady that ever faithfully ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... while they compel assent. Hence the best writing is that which most successfully resolves the paradox of combining the sharpest surprise with the widest recognition. Such an ideal is so difficult of attainment that, inevitably, many who subscribed to it succeeded only in unleavened platitude and others rejected it for ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... were not worthy of him, and they must answer for some of his falsities of style. These are apparent. His accumulation of empty and motley phrase, like a garish bunch of coloured bladders; his joy in platitude and pomposity, his proneness to say a little thing in great words, are only too easy to translate. We shall be well content if our version also gives some inkling of his qualities; not only of what Erasmus called his "wonderful vocabulary, his many pithy sayings, and the excellent ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... no one's fault," I said gently. But just as I was beginning to console her with what thumb-marked scraps of platitude I could collect—the only philosophy after all, such is the futility of systems, adequate to the deep issues of life—the door opened and the manager announced that the ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... love, walking down Magpie Alley? You could do it as well as I could. Love has the imagination in it, and the mind. I suppose that's the difference. And, too, love wants to give. This is all platitude. No one can ever say anything new about love, it's all been ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... melting upon the mitres and sunsets, and the boys' treble hovering over an ocean of harmony. But although the picture of his future life rose at his invocation it did not move him as heretofore, nor did the scenes he evoked of conjugal grossness and platitude shock him to the extent he had expected. The moral rebellion he succeeded in exciting was tepid, heartless, and ineffective, and he was not moved by hate or fear until he remembered that God in His infinite ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... Siena, however, would make little of any stress of such distinctions; one representative of a far-off social platitude being about as much in order as another as he stands before the great loggia of the Casino di Nobili, the club of the best society. The nobility, which is very numerous and very rich, is still, says the apparently competent native I began by quoting, perfectly feudal and uplifted and separate. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... "A platitude! Self-esteem is synonymous to genius. Still, I do not suppose he would in any circumstances have been a great poet; but there is enough of the poet about him to enhance and complete his ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... the violence of desires, and that character shares in the loss of strength which ought only to affect the passions. This is the reason why, in ages assumed to be refined, it is not a rare thing to see gentleness degenerate into effeminacy, politeness into platitude, correctness into empty sterility, liberal ways into arbitrary caprice, ease into frivolity, calm into apathy, and, lastly, a most miserable caricature treads on the heels of the noblest, the most beautiful type of humanity. Gentle and graceful beauty is therefore a want to the man ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... contempt which he feels, and which he fancies Caesar must have felt, for an advocate. Surely, however, it is a mistake to think that oratory was not even in those days a real power at Rome. Can a greater platitude be conceived than railing at a statesman of antiquity for having been a rhetorician? Was not Pericles a rhetorician? Was not Caesar himself a rhetorician? Did he not learn rhetoric from the same master as Cicero? Some day we may be ruled by political science; ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... what vicissitudes arise, and what complications occur, keep that resolve. It will at least help to sustain you with a sense of self-respect, if unhappiness from any outside source should shadow your life. An attractive home has become a sort of platitude in speech, but it remains a thing of vital importance, all the same, in actual ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... manner and her philosophical platitude, Sarah was more moved in her heart than she had dared to confess. From the moment that she had heard of Reuben's death—when she had gone over with some of her mourning to offer Molly—she had ceased to think of him as an old man, and her mind ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... postponed until certain forms of modern animism come under review. One or two preliminary observations, however, will be in place at this earlier stage. It is wise, for example, not to forget the limitations of our knowledge. A platitude! Yes—but one which even the greatest thinkers are apt to lose sight of, with consequent tendency to hasty generalisation and undue neglect of deep-seated instincts and intuitions. The discovery of some new cosmic law may change the whole face ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... had turned shop-keepers No one can testify but a householder Not of the stuff of which martyrs are made (Erasmus) Nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless Obstinate, of both sexes, to be burned One golden grain of wit into a sheet of infinite platitude Pardon for crimes already committed, or about to be committed Pardon for murder, if not by poison, was cheaper Paying their passage through, purgatory Poisoning, for example, was absolved for eleven ducats Pope and emperor maintain ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... was there. His cap was drawn down over his eyebrows, and his two thick lips were trembling, which added a look of stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was irritating to behold, and she saw written upon his coat all the platitude of the bearer. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... every one must have time to recover from this trivial platitude. But it was a silence outrageously shattered ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... shook her head. "It would be useless," she assured him. "He has a curious business code and will not abandon it. He will only quote some platitude about mixing sentiment ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... he found himself, he tried one great writer after another—Mill, Buckle, Carlyle, Emerson—all to no purpose, for he was not ready for them. At this period he read with great profit the "Recreations of a Country Parson," which, as he says, "gave me precisely the grade and shade of platitude I required." But more important were the weekly sermons of Henry Ward ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... her betrothed, and seemed to come at last to a conclusion that skirted platitude. "Jack, two people can be fond of each other without wanting to be together all the time. And I really am ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... our so-called civilization. Everybody lies—every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception—and purposely. Even in sermons—but that is a platitude. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Platitude has kissed, You threaten her with Night and Sorrow? Slay her by thousands, friend — but list: More Little Groups will ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... appeal to all men with convincing power and lend the most effective argument to Christianity. Whatever may have been its influence in the past, its threat is gone for the modern world. The word has grown weak. Ignorance has robbed the Grave of all its terror, and platitude despoiled Death of its sting. Death itself is ethically dead. Which of us, for example, enters fully into the meaning of words like these: "She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth?" Who allows adequate weight to the metaphor in the Pauline phrase, "To be carnally minded is Death;" ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... there was an infinite array of platitudes, phrased to fit every sort of emergency known to man. However, in a crisis such as this, it seemed to Brenton something little short of deliberate insult to offer a platitude to a man of Professor Opdyke's sort. All he could find to do, then, was to stand by and hold ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... know how it is, Jane, but whenever I say anything I feel you are just the one person on whom it seems to make an impression. You have a trick of repetition, and you manage to turn everything into a platitude. If you cannot do better than that, you might ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... absolute saintliness handed on from the people who experienced it. I suppose in a way the same applies to Our Lord. I always feel it wouldn't matter a bit to me if the four Gospels were proved to be forgeries to-morrow, because I should still be convinced that Our Lord was God. I know this is a platitude, but I don't think until I met Father Rowley that I ever realized the force and power that goes with exceptional goodness. There are so many people who are good because they were born good. Richard Ford, for example, he couldn't have ever been anything else but good, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... the surprising jet of their expression, remind one of a turned-on tap. What is within pours forth in an immediate, spontaneous rush. Her utterly unliterary style has at least the merit of being a vehicle exactly suited to her thoughts and feelings; and even the platitude of her phraseology carries with it a curiously personal flavour. Undoubtedly it was through her writings that she touched the heart of the public. Not only in her "Highland Journals" where the mild chronicle ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... not being versed in speculations regarding the attributes of the Deity, stared; then, disinclined to commit himself, took refuge in platitude. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... inferior saloon in Stenton, and, with an uncertain wave of his hand, arrested the barkeeper's attention. "I'm here," he articulated thickly, "to see life, understand! And I can see it too—money's power." The other regarded him with a brief, mechanical interest, a platitude shot suavely from ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... had an attack of the same platitude, and possibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature seems to have its mischief-making bacilli. The late "incomparable and ingenious ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the less obvious modes of advertising, you'll agree that this is the age of all ages for the man who can write puffs. 'Good wine needs no bush' has become a trade paradox, 'Judge by appearances,' a commercial platitude. The man who is ambitious and industrious turns his trick of writing into purely literary channels, and becomes a novelist. The man who is not ambitious and not industrious, and who does not relish the prospect of becoming a loafer in Strand wine-shops, writes advertisements. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... A trite platitude about his not caring to lose her was on his lips, but he refrained from uttering it. Another conclusion he had arrived at was that she was not to be nagged. Continual, or even occasional, reminders of his feeling for her would constitute a tactical ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... country has grown tired of soft platitude, silly truism and undisputed things said in such a solemn way. So when "The Philistine" stepped into the ring and voiced in no uncertain tones what its editor thought, thinking men and women stopped and listened. Editors ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... returned convict, who turns out to be the old applewoman's son; the vignette of the hostelry, with the figures of the huge fat landlord and the handmaid Jenny; the visit to the stranger gentleman who protects himself by "touching" against evil chance; the interview with the Rev. Mr. Platitude, and the bargain struck with the travelling tinker, Jack Slingsby, whose stock-in-trade and profession the writer determines to adopt. Then comes the word-master's detection in his new sphere of ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... myself; but, having crucified every rebellious thought, there was nothing left for control. I had marked my victory by extermination. To live was no joy; neither was it specially the reverse: a long, monotonous, changeless platitude; yet no desire to quit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... failing. He had certain arguments at his fingers' ends,—points with which he was, in truth, so familiar that he need hardly have troubled himself to arrange them for special use,—and he forgot even these. He found that he was going on with one platitude after another as to the benefit of reform, in a manner that would have shamed him six or seven years ago at a debating club. He pressed on, fearing that words would fail him altogether if he paused;—but he did in truth speak very much too fast, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... stuff; he rang the changes. All the papers cared for was sensation; to imperil the fortune of widows and orphans whose savings were invested in the South Shore Stock, for the sake of sensation, was a crime. He should have known better than to say that to me; it is such an ancient, worn-out platitude." ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... off, then said restlessly: "I think things out, you know, and at last I come to a conclusion, and it ends by being a platitude that all the goody, goody books have said times without number. But all the same that doesn't prevent it from being my discovery. It's nothing to do with goodness and nothing to do with evil, it's ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... regard the economic, industrial, and financial situation is rather hard to estimate, because their practical patriotism keeps them from making any public parade of their business troubles and worries, if they have any. The oft-repeated platitude that you would never suspect here that a war was going on if you didn't read the papers is quite just. Conditions—on the surface—are so normal that there is even a lively operatic fight on in Munich, where the personal friction between Musical Director ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... successive geological epochs and also at many places remote from each other. The key to the distribution of any group lies in the configuration of land and water of that epoch in which it made its first appearance. Although this sounds like a platitude, it has frequently been ignored. If, for argument's sake, Amphibia were evolved somewhere upon the great southern land-mass of Carboniferous times (supposed by some to have stretched from South America across Africa to Australia), the distribution of this developing class must have ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... translations from a score of languages he said he knew? Was he not, furthermore, an old Radical and Republican turned genteel? Were not his wife and daughters more than half suspected of being Jacobites, followers of the Reverend Mr. Platitude, and addicted to 'Charley o'er the Waterism'? Borrow did ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... true," he agreed. Mr. Harlan came of a race whose revolutionary notions expired apologetically before the first platitude to cross their path. "We must always bear in mind that women are capable of sacrifice; that women ..." The lavender stocking was withdrawing itself and Mr. Harlan stammered like an orator witnessing a sudden exodus of his audience, "that women are really capable ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... see that. I don't quite understand that. But it has nothing to do with my present purpose. When I said that we were neither of us so young as we once were, I uttered what was a stupid platitude,—a foolish truism.' ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... with nervous platitude, when once more they had lapsed into the silence he found it so hard to bear; "neither my wife nor myself has any ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... yet it must be said that there is scarcely a quatrain in which the rhyme does not trip him into a platitude, and there are too many swaggering with that expression forte d'un sentiment faible which Voltaire condemns in Corneille,—a temptation to which Dryden always lay too invitingly open. But there are passages higher in kind than any I have cited, because ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... machinery by which it can express itself. In this world the place of chorus, interpreter or commentator is not given to the wise man, but to the fool who has degraded the office to a profession. Jaques, the wise man, finds the place occupied by one whose comment is platitude. Wisdom has no place in the social scheme. The fool, he finds, has both ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... replied Bakkus, pausing in the act of lighting one of Elodie's special reserve of pre-war cigars. "Don't you realize I'm just transplanted from a forcing bed of High Anglican platitude?" ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... brave man should, the tears started to his eyes as he explained to me that the capture of the ship would leave him and his frau absolutely penniless in their old age. I endeavoured to soften the blow to him as much as possible by sympathetically murmuring some idiotic platitude about "the fortune of war," but of course it was no good; the poor old fellow simply shook his head and ejaculated—"Ay—the fortune of war! It is all very well for you, young sir, who depend upon ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... It was a significant observation, I thought; and as I went on my way home, writing another such chronicle with every springing step, it filled me with much reflection—largely of the nature of platitude, I have little doubt: such reflection, Reader, as is even already, I doubt less, rippling the surface of your mind with ever-widening circles. Yes! you sigh with an air, it is in the unconscious autobiographies ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... down with his Dictionary for his assaults upon the English language, has usurped the chair of the sturdy old dogmatist. The specious impertinence and shallow assumptions of the English sage find their counterpart in the unworthy platitude of the Scottish seer, not lively enough for "Punch," a mere disgrace to the page which admitted it; whether a proof of a hardening heart or a softening brain is uncertain, but charity hopes the latter is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... speech; and Roger's silence made me feel it was, which, with the rather patronizing opinion I had of Roger, I found not a little galling. So I, too, kept silence, and nothing beyond a platitude had passed between us when I found myself at my own door, my shopping utterly forgotten, and ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... camel-pads or flat rubber soles over bare solid rock, even if given the starting-point. No—he had got to die of thirst, starvation, and vultures, barring miracles of luck—and he had never had any good luck—for luck existed, undoubtedly, in spite of mealy-mouthed platitude-makers and twaddle about everything being pre-arranged and ordained with care and deliberation by a ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... usually prevalent, and perhaps more than usually acrid in the economic sphere. It is always a rather foolish controversy, and I have no intention of entering into it, but its prevalence makes it desirable to emphasize a platitude. Economic theory must be based upon actual fact: indeed, it must be essentially an attempt, like all theory, to describe the actual facts in proper sequence, and in true perspective; and if it does not do this it is an imposture. Moreover, the ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... is a platitude—a flat statement which reduces the facts of the case to an average, and calls that truth. It is absurd to imply, as does this old truism, that we may never judge a man by his words. Words are often the ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... taste!" said Harriet, who always delivered a platitude as if it was an epigram. She was curiously virulent about Italy, which she had never visited, her only experience of the Continent being an occasional six weeks in ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... but you can help him greatly in it," Miss Jencks instructed placidly (she was invaluable, was Barbara, when it was a matter of proper platitude, which flowed from her lips with the ease of water from a tap—and she believed it, too!) "a man needs a woman ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... summary, or wit's sentence define him. Definitions, because they must not be inexact or incomprehensive, sweep too wide, and the poet is not held within them; and out of the mere describer's range and capture he may escape by as many doors as there are outlets from a forest. But much ready-made platitude brings about the world's guesses at a poet, and false and flat thought lies behind its epigrams. It is not long since the general guess-work assigned melancholy, without authority, to a poet lately deceased. Real poets, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... might spare me your platitude, Andrew," The Laird replied savagely. "I'm done with the lad forever, for son of mine he is no longer. Andrew, do you remember the time he bought that red cedar stumpage up on the Wiskah and unloaded it on me at a profit of ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... upon the experience as an agreeable relaxation, as it undoubtedly is. But never for one moment did he allow such evanescent attachments to turn him a hair's breadth out of his course. Now something had happened to him, and he knew that for the future the platitude had become a lie, and that the only incentive either to high hopes or their fulfilment lay in the prospect of a hearth-stone shared by the girl who a few hours ago declared that she "would not like to ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... the jewels and the potter's wheel, the mothers and the light in baby's eyes. For the sempstress when she takes one stitch may make nine unnecessary; And the smooth and shining stone that rolls and rolls like the great river may gain no moss, And it is extraordinary what a lot you can do with a platitude when you dress it up in Blank Prose. Child, I smelt ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... effect or impression—we read it (as would be necessary) at a single sitting, the result is but a constant alternation of excitement and depression. After a passage of what we feel to be true poetry, there follows, inevitably, a passage of platitude which no critical prejudgment can force us to admire; but if, upon completing the work, we read it again, omitting the first book (that is to say, commencing with the second), we shall be surprised at now finding that admirable which we ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... to poor John? I did not for one moment doubt his entire guilt, and so, as people often do on such occasions, I took refuge in a platitude. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... as Christmas itself was the oh-quite-informal reception Mrs. Budlong gave to mitigate the ineffable stupidity of Christmas afternoon: that dolorous period when one meditates the ancient platitude that anticipation is better than realization; and suddenly understands why it is blesseder to give than to receive: because one does not have to ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... found himself no longer that silent and disdainful Horace Endicott, who on such an occasion would have cooly stuttered and stammered through fifty sentences of dull congratulation and platitude. Feeling aroused him, illumined him, on the instant, almost without wish of his own, at the contrast between two pictures which traced themselves on his imagination as he rose in his place: the wrecked man who had fled from Sonia Westfield, what ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Barbara resumed. "Sometimes one feels one wants a guide, but all one gets is a ridiculous platitude from her old-fashioned code. One has puzzles one can't solve by out-of-date rules. However, since she doesn't see, there's no ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... pioneer—and the splendour of its municipal buildings is as the justice of Aristides. But if an ugly woman does not dress well, who should? With all its civic spirit, Glasgow remains grey, prosaic, intolerable—the champion platitude of commercial civilisation. Aberdeen would have been a far finer example of the schematic city of which theorists dream. There is something heroic about the spaciousness of its streets, the loftiness of the buildings, and the omnipresence of granite—a Tyrtaean spirit, which finds ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... venture the veriest platitude, May not its grammar be shamefully weak? You, Mr. Punch, can rely on our gratitude, If you will tell us—how ought we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... notes; you must make allowances for haste, for bad inns, for the perpetual scramble, for ill-humour. Everywhere the same impression—the platitude of unbalanced democracy intensified by the platitude of the spirit of commerce. Everything on an immense scale—everything illustrated by millions of examples. My brother-in-law is always busy; he has appointments, inspections, ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... exercised a legitimate poetical ingenuity by versifying such knowledge as he had. These various causes make Manilius one of the most difficult of authors. Few can wade through the mingled solecisms in language and mistakes in science, the empty verbiage that dilates on a platitude in one place, and the jejune abstract that hurries over a knotty argument in another, without regretting that so unreadable a poet should ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... my conclusion,—to my platitude, if you will. Professor Fawcett used to say that he could lay down no rules for the sphere of government influence, except this rule, that no interference would do good unless it helped people ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... de fond. Thus would we ungenerously make Wagner prove our sum! But it is a sum that won't prove! The theory at its best does little more than suggest something, which if it is true at all, is a platitude, viz.: that progressive growth in all life makes it more and more possible for men to separate, in an art-work, moral ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... a man of average intelligence could command stupidity at will. But it isn't so. I suppose it's a special gift or else the difficulty consists in being relevant. Discovering that I could find no really telling stupidity, I turned to the next best thing; a platitude. I advanced, in a common sense tone, that, surely, in the matter of marriage a man had ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... offers to the poet? But then, if he pleased the bourgeoisie so much he was—oh, horror!—a bourgeois himself. That was obvious. How blind they had been not to see it sooner! When Amedee had read his verses not long since at Sillery's, by what aberration had they confounded this platitude with simplicity, this whining with sincere emotion, these stage tricks with art? Ah! you may rest assured, they never ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in the home. This is a platitude which no woman will ever dissent from, provided two words are dropped out of it. Woman's place is Home. Her task is homemaking. Her talents, as a rule, are mainly for homemaking. But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... a revelation.... That is perhaps a portentous word, but what else can one call it? It is a platitude, of course, to say that there is probably no one alive who does not remember some occasion of a sudden communion with another human being that was so beautiful, so touching, so transcendentally above ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... French"), and he kept from time to time insisting upon the proceedings being brought to a halt while a translation of something that had been said was furnished for his benefit, generally selecting some particularly unprofitable platitude which had been uttered by one of those present for the purpose of ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... word," Norgate admitted. "It's the sort of platitude I could watch framing in his mind before I was half-way through what I had to say. What they don't seem to take sufficient account of in that museum of mummied brains and parchment tongues—forgive me, Hebblethwaite, but it ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... calendar of all lovers?—The journal of a thousand incidents as interesting and important to two people as they are stupid and ridiculous to every one else. Each day was one of progress; finally, we loved each other. Excuse the homely platitude in ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... is absurd. Some of his reappearances, recognitions and coincidences must be inventions. The postillion's tale must be largely invention. But it is not fair or necessary to retort as Hindes Groome did: "Is the Man in Black then also a reality, and the Reverend Mr. Platitude? In other words, did Tractarianism exist in 1825, eight years before it was engendered by Keble's sermon?" For Borrow was unscrupulous or careless about time and place. But it is fair and necessary to say, as Hindes Groome did, that some of the unverities in "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" are ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... have been made by individuals for themselves; and each, having discovered anything, has found that that same principle was discovered a thousand times before, and written a thousand times. There is no platitude so platitudinous, but it remains to burst upon the perceptions of all who have not yet perceived it, as a new and burning truth; and on the other hand, there is no startling command to purity or compassion, that has not been given out by ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... me from the worst things. But it simply worries and almost exasperates me to hear religious talk from any one. When I hear a sermon I feel an inclination always to say, 'My dear fellow, can't you put your case better?' I want good stuff about Divine and human nature—not this vagueness and platitude. Why don't they tell one something about the optimism of God, even before the spectacle of men's weakness? But, instead, we are told to moan about this vale of tears; we are promised chastisements, disappointments, woes, persecution. A philosophy ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... King Friedrich; and Nature will not, by any suggestion of that terrible task, put him out in the one he has. He is nothing of a Luther, of a Cromwell; can look upon fakirs praying by their rotatory calabash, as a ludicrous platitude; and grin delicately as above, with the approval of his wiser contemporaries. Speed to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... on the Stock Exchange it is a platitude that you can only get a price in selling what some one else wants to buy; between men and women outside the Stock Exchange this is often considered a paradox."—From ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... Wessex itself, with all the coasts, he was free to visit, and to burn and rob in at discretion. There or elsewhere, Ethelred the Unready had no battle in him whatever; and, for a forty years after the beginning of his reign, England excelled in anarchic stupidity, murderous devastation, utter misery, platitude, and sluggish contemptibility, all the countries one has read of. Apparently a very opulent country, too; a ready skill in such arts and fine arts as there were; Svein's very ships, they say, had their gold dragons, top-mast pennons, and other metallic splendors ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... the old platitude about the fish in the sea being as good as any ever caught—and there really ought to be an excise tax on platitudes, for being addicted to them is quite as bad as being addicted to alcohol, and quite as benumbing to ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... always falls to the ground. It is only our familiarity with the one experience and our lack of knowledge concerning the other that gives us the condition of wonder in the one case and lack of it in the other. In the light of modern knowledge "order" is, as W. H. Mallock says, "a physical platitude, ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... let it alone. The great end of nature," Hilda went on, putting down her cup, "reasonable beings in their normal state would never lend themselves to. So she invents these temporary insanities. And therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be permanent. That's a platitude, I know," she ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... prevented from fulfilling their intention by a return of Cowper's malady. They became companions for life. Cowper says they were as mother and son to each other; but Mrs. Unwin was only seven years older than he. To label their connexion is impossible, and to try to do it would be a platitude. In his poems Cowper calls Mrs. Unwin Mary; she seems always to have called him Mr. Cowper. It is evident that her son, a strictly virtuous and religious man, never had the slightest misgiving about his ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... graven images; when we grow up, they approve of us on condition that we are like all the rest of the world—automatons: when you have seen one of them you've seen them all. So the lack of originality and initiative is upon us, and platitude and monotony are the distinctions of to-day. Truth can free us from this bondage: let our children be taught to be themselves, to ring clear, without crack or muffle. Make loyalty a need to them, and in their gravest ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... on our interest, that it is, probably, the earliest extant poetic drama. We see in it the tendency to grandiose language, not yet fully developed as in the Prometheus: the inclination of youth to simplicity, and even platitude, in religious and general speculation: and yet we recognize, as in the germ, the profound theology of the Agamemnon, and a touch of the political vein which appears more fully in the Furies. If the precedence in time here ascribed to it is correct, the play is perhaps worth more recognition ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... succeed in mastering it. It is plain in fact that her supposed parting glance upon them was one of suspicion. But there was no suspicion of Theobald; that he should have devoted his life to his children—why this was such a mere platitude, as almost to go ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... complementary platitude and you have the essence of modern fiction," observed Mrs. Ferrall. "Love is a subject talked to death, which explains the present shortage in the market I suppose. You're not in love and you don't miss it. Why cultivate an artificial taste for it? If it ever comes ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... friend of your host's wife? Are you to turn on a light suddenly and expose her slapping a surreptitious banjo? Or are you to hurl cochineal over her evening frock when she steals round with her phosphorus bottle and her supernatural platitude? There would be a scene, and you would be looked upon as a brute. So you have your choice of being that or a dupe. I was in no very good humor as I followed ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... romance was on every one's lips, and I recollect it as more or less thrust upon me in amends for the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality—that of the improper Mr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives in me the main question of where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois, could possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that Walt Whitman achieved an impropriety of the first magnitude; that success, however, but showed us the platitude returning in a genial ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Pam! hast ever read what's writ in holy pages, How blessed the peace-makers are, God's children of the ages? Perhaps you think the promise sweet was nothing but a platitude; 'Tis clear that you have no concern in that ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... answered, grimly. 'There are worse disappointments in store for them in life— Which is a fine old crusted platitude worthy of Aunt Susan. Anyhow, I've decided. Look here, Elsie: I stand to you in loco parentis.' I have already remarked, I think, that she was three years my senior; but I was so pleased with this phrase that ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... pierced it. It is hard to stanch wounds inflicted by a god. The glance of an ideal love is terrible and glorious, foreboding death and immortality together. Love could not be called divine without platitude if it regarded nothing but its nominal object; to be divine it must not envisage an accidental good but the principle of goodness, that which gives other goods their ultimate meaning, and makes all functions useful. Love is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... which goes, as he asserts, to "labour," is avowedly the amount which, according to his estimate, is paid to-day in America, as weekly wages to the mass of manual labourers. To say that labour in its more extended sense is the producer of all wealth, is a mere meaningless platitude. It is to say that there would be no wealth without effort of some kind. Does Mr. Wilshire seriously wish us to believe that he is telling Mr. Edison that "if he will only cast his ballot intelligently" he will be able to treble his income at the ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... fed upon cackle and platitude, FURNIVALL sauce to a dish full of dearth, Still, in the favourite FURNIVALL attitude, Grubbing about like ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... his whole nature into half-sensuous imagination, was the product not of one or more individual writers, but (it might be in the way of a response to their challenge) a general direction of men's minds, a delightful "fashion" of the time. He almost anticipated our modern idea, or platitude, of the Zeit-geist. A social instinct was involved in the matter, and loyalty to an intellectual movement. As its leader had himself been the first to suggest, the actual authorship belonged not so ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... are no one's fault," I said gently. But just as I was beginning to console her with what thumb-marked scraps of platitude I could collect—the only philosophy after all, such is the futility of systems, adequate to the deep issues of life—the door opened and the manager announced that ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... convenience, to "the above address," and desired that she should bring with her such letters or other documents as would establish her relationship to the deceased and assist in extracting the necessary Grant of Probate to the said Will, and it was subscribed by Messrs. Platitude & Glambe, Solicitors, Commissioners for Oaths ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... the spirit of retaliation for the iniquities of the British rovers which was condoned by their monarch. In justification of our part of the game during this period of warfare for religious and material ascendancy, we stand by the eternal platitude that in that age we were compelled to act differently from what we should be justified in doing now. Civilization, for instance, so the argument goes, was at a low ebb then. I am not so sure that it did not stand higher than it ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... possible. And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurts us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent. This idea is one of the oldest platitudes, but it is a platitude whose profound truth and urgency most people live and die without realising. People complain of the lack of power to concentrate, not witting that they may acquire the power, if ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... A most delightful legal platitude, as one might call it, is to be found in the opening of the learned Sergeant's speech. It is a familiar, transparent thing, often used to impose on the Jury. As Boz says of another topic, "Counsel often begins in this way because it ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... in the sense of the platitude, an education. All that we can learn in books is made up of, or springs from, the difference between the men living on the banks of this river, and the men who live in the valleys of those hills. The man who understands the distinctions of costumes, manners, methods and thought which thus exist, ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... was an infinite array of platitudes, phrased to fit every sort of emergency known to man. However, in a crisis such as this, it seemed to Brenton something little short of deliberate insult to offer a platitude to a man of Professor Opdyke's sort. All he could find to do, then, was to stand by and hold ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... be considered a law of religion and morality which needs some kind of violent counteraction, some continual intervention and providence, if it is to be kept in check. After all, this is only a dressing-up of the old platitude that a holy life means continual warfare and straining of the spirit against the flesh, of the moral order against the physical order, of altruism or the true egoism against selfishness or the false egoism. Of course an ideal civilization would help and not hinder religion; but the chances ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... journal of a thousand incidents as interesting and important to two people as they are stupid and ridiculous to every one else. Each day was one of progress; finally, we loved each other. Excuse the homely platitude in this avowal. ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... may notice—this is brought out in the second quotation—that profits directly produced by the war are not limited to the period of the war. This again is really axiomatic, being only another form of the platitude that it takes longer to construct than to destroy: but it means that even a short war of sufficient intensity will ensure a long period of profits, and therefore it noticeably aggravates the conclusions to which I ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... know the least who are the most anxious to tell it and the medium or automatic writer sometimes gives them the opportunity. Consequently we get many foolish communications and an enormous amount of commonplace platitude is delivered at seances. But it is equally true that unquestionable proof of personal identity ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... confess a failure. One would think that a man of average intelligence could command stupidity at will. But it isn't so. I suppose it's a special gift or else the difficulty consists in being relevant. Discovering that I could find no really telling stupidity, I turned to the next best thing; a platitude. I advanced, in a common sense tone, that, surely, in the matter of marriage a man had ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... morality, which had been accepted on the spot by a not too particular periodical and had never been paid for—that was the extent of his scribbling. And yet—Margaret might be right. . . . One never knows till one tries: and Vane grinned to himself as that hoary platitude floated through his mind. . . . Then his thoughts passed to the other side of the picture. Margaret, dispensing admonition and pills, in her best professional manner, to long queues of the great unwashed. He felt certain that ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... first to defend a man, You who had always the money to lend a man Down on his luck and hard up for a V, Sure you'll be playing a harp in beatitude (And a quare sight you will be in that attitude) Some day, where gratitude seems but a platitude, You'll find ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... life unconscious of the existence of certain common things until the occasion arises for noticing them, or accident forces them upon the attention; then they marvel that the thing should have escaped observation. This is a truism, no doubt, but the force of every platitude does not always present itself to every one. The comparison of handwritings is so essentially a matter of cultivating the powers of observation, that even if turned to no more practical account than that of a hobby its value as a mental exercise ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... remembering old times when they used to jeer at his sonorous commonplaces uttered below Gangway, took a pretty revenge. Out of oration of fifty-five minutes duration, he appropriated twenty-five to general observations prefacing exposition of clauses of Bill. Just the same kind of pompous platitude conveyed in turgid phraseology, at which, in old times, Members used to laugh and run away. But CHAPLIN had them now. Like the wedding guest whom the Ancient Mariner button-holed—though as PLUNKET reminds me, the A.M. was meagre in frame, and CHAPLIN is not—the House could ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... people," Andre ventured to observe; but the old man's wrath would not be assuaged by a platitude ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... glittering bark of this brilliant amateur in the art of letters is not invariably steered with equal dexterity of hand between the Scylla and Charybdis of paradox and platitude, it is impossible that in its course it should not once and again touch upon some point worth notice, if not exploration. Even that miserable animal the "unattached writer" may gratefully and respectfully recognize his accurate apprehension and his felicitous application of well-nigh the most hackneyed ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... with its complementary platitude and you have the essence of modern fiction," observed Mrs. Ferrall. "Love is a subject talked to death, which explains the present shortage in the market I suppose. You're not in love and you don't miss it. Why cultivate an artificial taste for it? If it ever comes naturally, you'll be ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... or try to follow it through its convolutions of matter-of-fact, its involutions of logic, its wriggling through axioms, I smile a new smile and my heart laughs within me. If I miss the point, I am not in a panic, and if, at the end of the seventeenth platitude that did not need to be proved, I find I do not know where ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... through these words, to get at the idea in St Paul's mind for which they stand, and have so long stood. It can be no worthless idea they represent—no mere platitude, which a man, failing to understand it at once, may without loss leave behind him. The words mean something which Paul believes vitally associated with the life and death of his Master. He had seen Jesus with his bodily eyes, I think, but he had ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... always at one's right hand and one's left, is the frightfullest Abyss and Pandemonium' (Dec. 8, 1837). Emerson's temperament and his whole method made the warning needless, and, as before, while 'vociferous platitude was dinning his ears on all sides,' a whole world of thought was 'silently building itself in these calm depths.' But what would those two divinities of his, Plato and Socrates, have said of a man who 'could not give an account ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... is a commonplace of observation, indeed, that a housewife who actually knows how to cook, or who can make her own clothes with enough skill to conceal the fact from the most casual glance, or who is competent to instruct her children in the elements of morals, learning and hygiene—it is a platitude that such a woman is very rare indeed, and that when she is encountered she is not usually esteemed for her general intelligence. This is particularly true in the United States, where the position of women is higher than in any other civilized or semi-civilized country, and the old ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... bad floor," Rachel said. Hirst did not attempt to answer her platitude. He sat quite silent, staring at the dancers. After three minutes the silence became so intolerable to Rachel that she was goaded to advance another commonplace about the beauty of the ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... upon him was extraordinary—far more vivid than men of mature years can easily conceive. It is often so in early youth when we listen to the voice of authority; some particular chance phrase will have an unmeasured effect upon one. A worn tag and platitude solemnly spoken, and at a critical moment, may change the whole of a career. And so it was with George, as you will shortly perceive. For as he rumbled along in the Tube his father's words became a veritable obsession within him: he saw their value ramifying in a multitude of ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... intense fondness, when, after wasting hours over a few lines of poetry, he would misplace all the adjectives and barbarously entreat the metre. She laughed with gratification, when, excited by the bright sayings that fell from her lips, the youth put forth some platitude, dim as the lamp in the expiring fire-fly. When he slipped in grammar she saw malice under it, when he retailed a borrowed jest she called it a good one, and when he used —as princes sometimes will —bad language, she discovered in it a ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real—the upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of artists seeks after the ideal—the ideal which may mean sublimity or platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he is a realist or an idealist; we classify all dead artists as realists or idealists; we treat the matter as if it were one of almost moral importance. Now the fact of the case is that ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... conclusion,—to my platitude, if you will. Professor Fawcett used to say that he could lay down no rules for the sphere of government influence, except this rule, that no interference would do good unless it helped people to help themselves. I think that the doctrine was characteristic ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... platitude about his not caring to lose her was on his lips, but he refrained from uttering it. Another conclusion he had arrived at was that she was not to be nagged. Continual, or even occasional, reminders of his feeling for her would constitute a tactical ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... usually changes the subject," muttered the editor savagely under cover of an amiable platitude put forth by ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... you my little notes; you must make allowances for haste, for bad inns, for the perpetual scramble, for ill-humour. Everywhere the same impression—the platitude of unbalanced democracy intensified by the platitude of the spirit of commerce. Everything on an immense scale—everything illustrated by millions of examples. My brother-in-law is always busy; he has appointments, inspections, ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... raw period in authorship which is common to most growing writers, when the style is "overlanguaged," and when it plunges wildly through the "sandy deserts of rhetoric," or struggles as if it were having a personal difficulty with Ignorance and his brother Platitude. It was capitally said of Chateaubriand that "he lived on the summits of syllables," and of another young author that "he was so dully good, that he made even virtue disreputable." Hawthorne had ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... selfish creature, and never very grateful unless he expects a continuance of past favors. With him a cessation of favors means a cessation of gratitude. A limited number of the Platitude class still linger about me—principally on account of a long-contracted habit. They are content with whatever they get; they are entirely harmless, always useful in some way, ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... Sand had settled down in Venice with Pagello—and with all the family, all the Pagello tribe, with the brother, the sister, to say nothing of the various rivals who came and made scenes. It was the vulgar, ordinary platitude of an Italian intimacy of this kind. In spite of everything, she continued congratulating ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... of chilling insight that in future many problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. "After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... the ill-luck that befell others. For instance, was it not shameful that art should be dishonoured by all those medals, all those crosses, all those rewards, which were so badly distributed to boot? Were artists always to remain like little boys at school? All the universal platitude came from the docility and cowardice which were shown, as in the presence of ushers, so as to ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... help asking himself if she weren't, thus pressed, speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should be most in a hole if his history should prove all a platitude. "Are you telling me the truth, so that I shan't have been a bigger idiot than I can bear to know? I haven't lived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted illusion? I haven't waited but to see the ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... details for office-seekers, whilst Ira A. Cole, in "Five Sticks on Finance," gives some interesting suggestions for economy. "Opportunity," an essay by Mildred Blanchard, concludes the issue, and successfully disputes the noxious old platitude, that "Opportunity knocks but once at each man's door." With the Quarterly is bound The New Member, reviewed elsewhere, the two forming a ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... little," he said quietly at last. "To me, the consecration of a love which has leaped the bounds of mere platitude. A woman of your training perhaps cannot grasp the honesty of my unconvention. I have meant you no harm. But that you ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... quaver—an intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her. It was difficult for me to be very original in reply, and I'm afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she didn't mean to go to church, since that was an obvious way of being good. She made answer that ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... effective argument to Christianity. Whatever may have been its influence in the past, its threat is gone for the modern world. The word has grown weak. Ignorance has robbed the Grave of all its terror, and platitude despoiled Death of its sting. Death itself is ethically dead. Which of us, for example, enters fully into the meaning of words like these: "She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth?" Who allows adequate weight to the metaphor in the Pauline phrase, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... The platitude slipped from him absently. He had no wish for the concert, no wish to hear Berlinese trulls and bubonic bassi bleat. But, for the tolerably delicate enterprise that he had in hand, there were the preliminary steps which could only be hastened slowly and anything ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... mediaeval vocabulary; but they were not worthy of him, and they must answer for some of his falsities of style. These are apparent. His accumulation of empty and motley phrase, like a garish bunch of coloured bladders; his joy in platitude and pomposity, his proneness to say a little thing in great words, are only too easy to translate. We shall be well content if our version also gives some inkling of his qualities; not only of what Erasmus called his "wonderful vocabulary, his many pithy sayings, and ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... a wife's devotion is a very strong motive power, Jeffries. It will move irresistibly forward in spite of all the barriers you and I can erect to stay its progress. That may sound like a platitude, but it's a ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... must return To that same home, while bosoms burn With platitude for kindness shown To those ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... commendable in taste, conception, or execution. To torture the Muses to madness, to wire-draw poetry through inextricable coils of difficult rhymes and impossible measures; to hammer one golden grain of wit into a sheet of infinite platitude, with frightful ingenuity to construct ponderous anagrams and preternatural acrostics, to dazzle the vulgar eye with tawdry costumes, and to tickle the vulgar ear with virulent personalities, were tendencies which perhaps smacked of the hammer, the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to the ground. It is only our familiarity with the one experience and our lack of knowledge concerning the other that gives us the condition of wonder in the one case and lack of it in the other. In the light of modern knowledge "order" is, as W. H. Mallock says, "a physical platitude, not a ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... neither the boon of life nor the beauty of the world suffices to content, it comes as a penance that life with them is squandered and that they possess neither the benefits nor the beauty of the world." That might be a platitude said by some one else; but we know that in it Leonardo expresses his faith. The boon of life, the beauty of the world, were enough for him without ambition, without even further affections. He left ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... dolls or graven images; when we grow up, they approve of us on condition that we are like all the rest of the world—automatons: when you have seen one of them you've seen them all. So the lack of originality and initiative is upon us, and platitude and monotony are the distinctions of to-day. Truth can free us from this bondage: let our children be taught to be themselves, to ring clear, without crack or muffle. Make loyalty a need to them, and in their gravest failures, ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... analysis and of comment, the long descriptions and the nervous pathology, are omitted by Miss Mayor's method, which is all for the swift movement and against the temptations to delay which obstruct those whose eyes are not upon life; she condenses her opportunities for psychology and platitude into a couple of shrewd lines and goes on with her story, keeping her freshness and the reader's interest unabated. The method is to draw the central figure rapidly past a succession of bright lights, keeping the lights various ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... not give the words of the minister's prayer. The words are not the prayer. Mr. Drake's words were commonplace, with much of the conventionality and platitude of prayer-meetings. He had always objected to the formality of the Prayer-book, but the words of his own prayers without book were far more formal; the prayer itself was in the heart, not on the lips, and was far better than the words. But poor Dorothy heard only the words, and they did not ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... his taste!" said Harriet, who always delivered a platitude as if it was an epigram. She was curiously virulent about Italy, which she had never visited, her only experience of the Continent being an occasional six weeks in ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... she looked very like an angel, and accepting the proffered seat, sat down beside her. He uttered some platitude as to this deep obligation for the trouble she had taken, and wondered more and more ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... world in which, as we nowadays begin to realise, we find two antagonistic streams of traditional platitude concerning the question of sexual purity, both flowing from ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... Germans regard the economic, industrial, and financial situation is rather hard to estimate, because their practical patriotism keeps them from making any public parade of their business troubles and worries, if they have any. The oft-repeated platitude that you would never suspect here that a war was going on if you didn't read the papers is quite just. Conditions—on the surface—are so normal that there is even a lively operatic fight on in Munich, where the personal friction between Musical Director Walters ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... spare us this alliteration and humbug," Cappy fairly shrieked. "You're driving me crazy. If it isn't platitude, it's your dog-gone habit of initialing things!" He placed his old elbows on his knees and bowed his head in his hands. "If I'm not the original Mr. Tight Wad!" he lamented. "But you must forgive me, Matt. I got in the habit of thinking of expense when I was young, and I've never gotten ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... note in his gamut. Nature is not only never his model, she is never his inspiration. He is distinctively a literary painter; but this description is not minute enough. His conventions are those not merely of the litterateur, but of the extremely conventional litterateur. An artless platitude is really more artificial than a clever paradox; it doesn't even cast a side-light on the natural material with which it deals. Greuze's genre is really a genre of his own—his own and that of ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... when he spoke of "the natural equality of man," used a curious eighteenth century phrase, of which a Greek scholar can see the origin; but it did not mean anything absurd, nor, on the other hand, did it convey a mere platitude. It should not be necessary to explain, as Lincoln did long after, that Jefferson did not suppose all men to be of equal height or weight or equally wise or equally good. He did, however, contend for a principle ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... very articulate in proving what to all readers with a sense for reality will seem a platitude, am I not wasting words? We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis. The only difference is that while some hypotheses can be refuted ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... But what are you to do with the friend of your host's wife? Are you to turn on a light suddenly and expose her slapping a surreptitious banjo? Or are you to hurl cochineal over her evening frock when she steals round with her phosphorus bottle and her supernatural platitude? There would be a scene, and you would be looked upon as a brute. So you have your choice of being that or a dupe. I was in no very good humor as I followed Wilson to ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... traditions. Above all, the principle was in this generation very definitely established that India, like other great dependencies, must be administered in the interests of its own people, and not in the interests of the ruling race. That seems to us to-day a platitude. It would not have seemed a platitude in the eighteenth century. It would not seem a platitude in modern Germany. And it may safely be said that the enunciation of such a doctrine would have seemed merely absurd in any of the earlier historical empires. ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... walked on, "I must go to that confounded harvest-supper. I begin to think there is something true in the venerable platitude about love in a cottage. And Will Somers must be married in haste, in ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and War are twain (see Chadband's platitude); War you could summon by your single self, But Peace—for she adopts a stickier attitude— Takes two to mobilise her off the shelf; Unless one side's so weak That, try his best, he cannot ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... a spiteful speech; and Roger's silence made me feel it was, which, with the rather patronizing opinion I had of Roger, I found not a little galling. So I, too, kept silence, and nothing beyond a platitude had passed between us when I found myself at my own door, my shopping utterly forgotten, and something ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... soles over bare solid rock, even if given the starting-point. No—he had got to die of thirst, starvation, and vultures, barring miracles of luck—and he had never had any good luck—for luck existed, undoubtedly, in spite of mealy-mouthed platitude-makers and twaddle about everything being pre-arranged and ordained with care and deliberation by ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... sublime and grandiose effects of Nature are apt to lose their edge for us by over-popularization, as many of her scenes and moods have come to seem platitude from being over-painted. Niagara has suffered far more from the sentimental tourist and the landscape artist than from all the power-houses, and one has to make a strenuous effort of detachment from its excursionist associations ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... there may be as many brands of Methodism. If so we unhesitatingly place Mr. Rowell in the evolutionary group. Therefore by personal development he is next thing to a Conservative; and the latest phase of his career proves that in working it out he has practised the fine old platitude of ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... said restlessly: "I think things out, you know, and at last I come to a conclusion, and it ends by being a platitude that all the goody, goody books have said times without number. But all the same that doesn't prevent it from being my discovery. It's nothing to do with goodness and nothing to do with evil, it's nothing to do with strength, and nothing to do with weakness; it simply is that there are some ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... fill the mind with exalted visions of coming joy. But when it appears, on examination, that the book is as utterly unworthy of these elaborate commendations as any book can possibly be,—that it is from beginning to end nothing but a dead level of stagnant verbiage, a desolate waste of dreary platitude,—the reader cannot but regard the publishers' ardent expressions of approbation as going quite beyond the license ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... There or elsewhere, Ethelred the Unready had no battle in him whatever; and, for a forty years after the beginning of his reign, England excelled in anarchic stupidity, murderous devastation, utter misery, platitude, and sluggish contemptibility, all the countries one has read of. Apparently a very opulent country, too; a ready skill in such arts and fine arts as there were; Svein's very ships, they say, had their gold dragons, top-mast pennons, and other metallic ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... there is yet another subject for a platitude. Flavour! An impalpable quality, less easily captured than the scent of a flower, the peculiar and most essential attribute of any work of art! It is the thin, poignant spirit which hovers up out of a play, and is as much its differentiating essence as is caffeine of coffee. Flavour, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... first who dared to draw Mankind the mixture that he saw; Not wholly good nor ill, but both, With fine intricacies of growth. He pulled the wraps of flesh apart, And showed the working human heart; He scorned to drape the truthful nude With smooth, decorous platitude! ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... combined with inanity, is carried almost to madness. There is a magnificent drawing of the series of "Le Public du Salon," old classicists looking up, horrified and scandalized, at the new romantic work of 1830, in which the faces have an appalling gloom of mystification and platitude. We feel that Daumier reproduces admirably the particular life that he sees, because it is the very medium in which he moves. He has no wide horizon; the absolute bourgeois hems him in, and he is a bourgeois himself, without poetic ironies, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... a fine, though archaic, poem, with this special claim on our interest, that it is, probably, the earliest extant poetic drama. We see in it the tendency to grandiose language, not yet fully developed as in the Prometheus: the inclination of youth to simplicity, and even platitude, in religious and general speculation: and yet we recognize, as in the germ, the profound theology of the Agamemnon, and a touch of the political vein which appears more fully in the Furies. If the precedence in time here ascribed to it is correct, the play ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... cherry-trees in pots! They were followed by jovial Pan with green hair and jewelled sandals, and by his side—I could scarcely believe my eyes!—walked a modest nun counting her beads. At a little distance were seen three dancers arm-in-arm, a lean, starved platitude, a rosy, dimpled joke, and a steel-ribbed sermon on predestination. Close upon them came a whole string of Nights with wind-blown hair and Days with faggots on their backs. All at once I saw the ample figure of Life rise above the whirling ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... voice and their soul, the cloud of incense melting upon the mitres and sunsets, and the boys' treble hovering over an ocean of harmony. But although the picture of his future life rose at his invocation it did not move him as heretofore, nor did the scenes he evoked of conjugal grossness and platitude shock him to the extent he had expected. The moral rebellion he succeeded in exciting was tepid, heartless, and ineffective, and he was not moved by hate or fear until he remembered that God in His infinite goodness had placed him for ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... that shame our so-called civilization. Everybody lies—every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception—and purposely. Even in sermons—but that is a platitude. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Being. Hobbes looked at the great end of existence and embodied it in a double axiom. 1st. The desire for self-preservation. 2nd. To render ourselves happy. From those duplex principles which are inherent in all animals, a modern politician has perpetrated a platitude which represents in a sentence the end and aim of all legislation, "the greatest happiness for the greatest number." This is the ultimatum of Hobbes's philosophy. Its method of accomplishment was by treating society as one large family, with the educated ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... creatures of public opinion. They wrote for the masses. Their columns were filled with their own peculiar brand of propaganda, illusions, dreams, assertions, prejudices, sensations, with always a cheap smear of moral platitude. Our people had grown too busy to do their own thinking. The daily newspapers now did it for them. There was as little originality in them as in the machines which printed the editions. Yet they were repeated by the ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... I hurl a stern defiance at what other people say: Learning's torch I fiercely kindle, with my HAECKEL, HUXLEY, TYNDALL, And all preaching is a swindle, that's the motto of to-day. I'd give the wildest latitude to each agnostic attitude, And everything's a platitude that springs not from my mind: I've studied entomology, astronomy, conchology, And every other 'ology that anyone can find. I am a man of science, with my bottles on the shelf, I'm game to make a little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... political and the social order—a relative status, moreover, that is measured by the demands of American ideals. The farm problem thus connects itself with the whole question of democratic civilization. This is not mere platitude. For we cannot properly judge the significance and the relation of the different industrial activities of our farmers, and especially the value of the various social agencies for rural betterment, except by the standard of class status. It is ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... thing ought not to be said, you take one of them down, and make it perform the service of the intoxicated Spartan slave. There are some volumes in which, at a chance opening, you are certain to find a mere platitude delivered in the most superb and amazing climax of big words, and others in which you have a like happy facility in finding every proposition stated with its stern forward, as sailors say, or in some other grotesque mismanagement ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... that we have no satisfactory translation of "Don Quixote." To those who are familiar with the original, it savours of truism or platitude to say so, for in truth there can be no thoroughly satisfactory translation of "Don Quixote" into English or any other language. It is not that the Spanish idioms are so utterly unmanageable, or that ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Hugo and so Wagner have a certain pauvrete de fond. Thus would we ungenerously make Wagner prove our sum! But it is a sum that won't prove! The theory at its best does little more than suggest something, which if it is true at all, is a platitude, viz.: that progressive growth in all life makes it more and more possible for men to separate, in an art-work, moral weakness from ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... I suppose in a way the same applies to Our Lord. I always feel it wouldn't matter a bit to me if the four Gospels were proved to be forgeries to-morrow, because I should still be convinced that Our Lord was God. I know this is a platitude, but I don't think until I met Father Rowley that I ever realized the force and power that goes with exceptional goodness. There are so many people who are good because they were born good. Richard Ford, for example, he couldn't have ever been anything else but good, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... great truths of life over and over and we are not excited. Truth never excites—it is falsehood that excites—until we discover it in our lives. Until we see it with our own eyes. Then there is a thrill. Then the old truth becomes a new blessing. Then the oldest, driest platitude crystallizes into a flashing jewel to delight and enrich our consciousness. This joy of discovery ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... hated for his birth, and have knocked down with his Dictionary for his assaults upon the English language, has usurped the chair of the sturdy old dogmatist. The specious impertinence and shallow assumptions of the English sage find their counterpart in the unworthy platitude of the Scottish seer, not lively enough for "Punch," a mere disgrace to the page which admitted it; whether a proof of a hardening heart or a softening brain is uncertain, but charity hopes the latter is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... business, the enclitic de—were stimulants; they heightened his effects. They helped him make clear his meaning, that life is greater than art. These savageries spoke to the hearts of men tired of smoothness and platitude, and who were relieved by just such a breaking up of the ice. Men loved Browning not only for what he was, but also ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Many greedy priests, of lower rank, had turned shop-keepers No one can testify but a householder Not of the stuff of which martyrs are made (Erasmus) Nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless Obstinate, of both sexes, to be burned One golden grain of wit into a sheet of infinite platitude Pardon for crimes already committed, or about to be committed Pardon for murder, if not by poison, was cheaper Paying their passage through, purgatory Poisoning, for example, was absolved for eleven ducats ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... mere sham.' But even allowing the force of that objection, the idea of a 'world in the making,' though it appeals to the popular mind, is not quite free from ambiguity. In one sense it states a platitude—a truth, indeed, which is not excluded from an absolute or teleological conception of life. But if it is implied that the world, because it is in process of production, may violate reason and take some capricious form, the idea is absurdly false, so long as we are what ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... feelings is extinguished with the violence of desires, and that character shares in the loss of strength which ought only to affect the passions. This is the reason why, in ages assumed to be refined, it is not a rare thing to see gentleness degenerate into effeminacy, politeness into platitude, correctness into empty sterility, liberal ways into arbitrary caprice, ease into frivolity, calm into apathy, and, lastly, a most miserable caricature treads on the heels of the noblest, the most beautiful type of humanity. Gentle and graceful beauty is therefore a want ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... a sacred privilege for which mankind always had to fight. These struggles [Platitude—but push on] fill the pages of history. History records the gradual triumph of the serf over the lord, the slave over the master. The master has continually tried to usurp unlimited powers. Power during the medieval ages accrued ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... was brought under Matthew Arnold's notice, his judgment was clear, sympathetic, and independent. He had the readiest appreciation of true excellence, a quick intolerance of turgidity and inflation—of what he called endeavors to render platitude endurable by making it pompous, and lively horror of affectation and unreality."—Mr. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... down her open throat and into her shirtwaist. It was as if the platitude merged with the very corpuscles of a blush that sank down ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... hard to replace." Mounser Green was always eloquent as to the needs of the public service, and did really in his heart of hearts care about his office. "Who is to go to Patagonia, I'm sure I don't know. Platitude was asking me about it, and I told him that I ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... wave of his hand, arrested the barkeeper's attention. "I'm here," he articulated thickly, "to see life, understand! And I can see it too—money's power." The other regarded him with a brief, mechanical interest, a platitude shot suavely from hard, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of old Siena, however, would make little of any stress of such distinctions; one representative of a far-off social platitude being about as much in order as another as he stands before the great loggia of the Casino di Nobili, the club of the best society. The nobility, which is very numerous and very rich, is still, says the apparently competent native I began by quoting, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. nonsense, utter nonsense, gibberish; jargon, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin^, platitude, niaiserie^; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae [Lat.]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, wish-wash, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... said that this is both obvious and to be ignored—a platitude with a flavour of cant. Is it? Do we not hear again and again the appeal to envy and hatred as motives of action, a desire in social life to pull down, if levelling up is not immediately practicable? ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... theater of half that size to get it up in, well and good; but seen from a distance, which defies discrimination of objects, a thistle is as good as a rose, and in that enormous frame refinement is mere platitude, and finish ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... inevitable that, apropos of Poe, our customary national nonsense about the "art of the short story" should have recurred in a painful and acute form. It is a platitude of "Literary Pages" that Anglo-Saxon writers cannot possess themselves of the "art of the short story." The only reason advanced has been that Guy du Maupassant wrote very good short stories, and he was French! God be thanked! Last week we all admitted that Poe ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... none to assure themselves to the contrary. There may even be doubts as to whether the majority of rich invalids would exchange their check-books for the privilege of being husky paupers in spite of the time-honored platitude ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... what is, I believe, called a lovely summer's night. To say that it is hot would be as feeble a platitude as the same remark would be in the small ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... anti-British elements whose aims would commonly be classed by the authorities as "mad ambitions," which is what Count Apponyi called the separatist tendencies of the Southern Slavs in Austria-Hungary. But—may the platitude be pardoned!—there is all the difference between the spirit in which the alien rule of the one government was, and of the other is, administered. No doubt there are portions of the British Empire in which a plebiscite ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... derision. The members of a Protective Association of Jewish Peddlers organized at Hull-House related daily experiences in which old age had been treated with such irreverence, cherished dignity with such disrespect, that a listener caught the passion of Lear in the old texts, as a platitude enunciated by a man who discovers in it his own experience thrills us as no unfamiliar phrases can possibly do. The Greeks are filled with amazed rage when their very name is flung at them as an opprobrious epithet. Doubtless these difficulties ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... may serve for a text. His contemplation enables him to see the pathetic side of the small pains and pleasures which we are generally in too great a hurry to notice. There are times, of course, when this moralising tendency leads him to the regions of the namby-pamby or sheer prosaic platitude. On the other hand, no one approaches him in the power of touching some rich chord of feeling by help of the pettiest incident. The old man going to the fox-hunt with a tear on his ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... On the other hand, the annexation of the same province in 1908 had just the opposite effect, for from that time the ultimate ideal was no longer Greater Croatia or Greater Serbia in any selfish sense, but Jugo-slavia, because, to use a platitude, Bosnia had scrambled the eggs. Evidence of the fairly amicable relations between Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs at the time of Gaj is not lacking. It was Gaj who reformed Croatian orthography on the basis of the Serbian. Bleiweis and Vraz endeavored ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... sufferings and of righteous indignation against bigots, and if he only half understands his own optimism, that "whatever is is right," the vision, rather poetical than philosophical, of a harmonious universe lifts him at times into a region loftier than that of frigid and pedantic platitude. The most popular passages were certain purple patches, not arising very spontaneously or with much relevance, but also showing something more than the practised rhetorician. The "poor Indian" in one ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... smile at the oft-repeated tale of the poor tiger in Dore's picture that hadn't got a Christian. On the other hand, it tickles me immensely to behold a plethoric commonplace Briton roar himself purple with impassioned platitude at a political meeting; but I perceive that all my neighbours take him with the utmost seriousness. Again, your literary journalist professes to wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is the dullest lady ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... starved, were it not best to end it; to have done with it, and restore it once for all to the Joetuns, Mud-giants, Frost-giants, and Chaotic Brute-gods of the Beginning? For the old Anarchic Brute-gods it may be well enough; but it is a Platitude which Men should be above countenancing by their presence in it. We pray you, let the word impossible disappear from your vocabulary in this matter. It is of awful omen: to all of us, and to ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Rev. Mr. Platitude visits author, Borrow leaves early; walks N. for two hours; buys Slingsby's pony and cart; afternoon travels N.W.; late at night arrives at a dingle ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the gaiety of Paris, has been disappointed at finding that French provincial towns can be as dull as dulness itself could require. It is in the somewhat unjust mood which is commonly begotten of disillusion that Sterne discovers the cause of his ennui in "the eternal platitude of the French character," with its "little variety and no originality at all." "They are very civil," he admits, "but civility itself so thus uniform wearies and bothers me to death. If I do not mind I shall grow ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... Stock Exchange it is a platitude that you can only get a price in selling what some one else wants to buy; between men and women outside the Stock Exchange this is often considered a paradox."—From the diary of ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... the firm, over a fireplace that maintained its useless dignity in spite of the steam-radiator near the window. On his desk was the inevitable picture of his wife framed in silver, a hand-illumined platitude of Stevenson, an elaborate set of desk paraphernalia in beaten brass that bore little evidence of service. In two green-glazed bowls of Japanese origin, roses from Mr. Flint's garden at Yolanda scattered faint pink petals on the Smyrna rug. These flowers were the only concession ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... to do a very sacred thing to-day: to enunciate a couple of platitudes and attest them. It is always a solemn moment in life when one can sincerely subscribe to a platitude. Platitudes are the things which people of plain minds shout from the steps of the staircase of life as they ascend; and to discover the truth of a platitude by experience means that you have climbed ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... franchise. We can vote, but what is the use of voting when you know nothing of the issues at stake, and when even the candidates are ignorant of affairs and try to win by making sentimental popular appeals to varying prejudices? England is low. It is a humiliating platitude. England stands far lower to-day than the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... I don't quite understand that. But it has nothing to do with my present purpose. When I said that we were neither of us so young as we once were, I uttered what was a stupid platitude,—a foolish truism.' ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Committee of 1892 reported, I was considered guilty of a perverse paradox when I said that the witness who knew least about the theatre was Henry Irving. Yet a moment's consideration would have shown that the paradox was a platitude. For about quarter of a century Irving was confined night after night to his own theatre and his own dressing-room, never seeing a play even there because he was himself part of the play; producing the works ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... remarks. There is one virtue, I am sure, in after-dinner oratory, and that is brevity; and as to that I am reminded of a story. The Lord Chief Justice has told you what are the ingredients of after-dinner oratory. They are the joke, the quotation, and the platitude; and the successful platitude, in my judgment, requires a very high order of genius. I believe that I have not given you a quotation, but I am reminded of something which I heard when very young—the story of a Methodist clergyman in America. He was preaching at a camp meeting, and ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... bourgeoisie so much he was—oh, horror!—a bourgeois himself. That was obvious. How blind they had been not to see it sooner! When Amedee had read his verses not long since at Sillery's, by what aberration had they confounded this platitude with simplicity, this whining with sincere emotion, these stage tricks with art? Ah! you may rest assured, they never will be ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... fingers' ends,—points with which he was, in truth, so familiar that he need hardly have troubled himself to arrange them for special use,—and he forgot even these. He found that he was going on with one platitude after another as to the benefit of reform, in a manner that would have shamed him six or seven years ago at a debating club. He pressed on, fearing that words would fail him altogether if he paused;—but he did in truth speak very much ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... pointed to the toes of a pair I had just brought him for mending. It was a significant observation, I thought; and as I went on my way home, writing another such chronicle with every springing step, it filled me with much reflection—largely of the nature of platitude, I have little doubt: such reflection, Reader, as is even already, I doubt less, rippling the surface of your mind with ever-widening circles. Yes! you sigh with an air, it is in the unconscious autobiographies we are every ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... too, after having noted that our education merely produces narrow-minded bourgeois, lacking in initiative and will-power, or anarchists—"those two equally harmful types of the civilised man, who degenerates into impotent platitude or insane destructiveness"—he too, I say, draws a comparison that cannot be the object of too much reflection between our French lycees (public schools), those factories of degeneration, and the American schools, which prepare ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... was a greater piece of absurdity in the world. I thought so when I was a child, and now I know it; and I desire here to brand it as at once a platitude and a falsehood. How ever the idea gained currency that childhood is the happiest period of life, I cannot conceive. How ever, once started, it kept afloat is equally incomprehensible. I should have supposed that the experience of every sane ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... considered her betrothed, and seemed to come at last to a conclusion that skirted platitude. "Jack, two people can be fond of each other without wanting to be together all the time. And I really am fond ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... obvious modes of advertising, you'll agree that this is the age of all ages for the man who can write puffs. 'Good wine needs no bush' has become a trade paradox, 'Judge by appearances,' a commercial platitude. The man who is ambitious and industrious turns his trick of writing into purely literary channels, and becomes a novelist. The man who is not ambitious and not industrious, and who does not relish the prospect of becoming a loafer in Strand wine-shops, writes advertisements. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... retirement, and believing in the generosity of the British nation, he threw himself on their hospitality. He had made his way through a network of blockade when he returned from Egypt and Elba, and looking at the facts as they are now before us, it is preposterous to adhere to the boastful platitude that he was so hemmed in that he had no option but to ask Captain Maitland to receive him as the guest of England aboard the Bellerophon, and it may be taken for granted that the resourceful sailors knew that he had many channels of escape. They knew the Bellerophon ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... drink of water. He was now quite in his element, and had got into the proper way of punching the table with his fists. A few words dropping from Mr. Sowerby did now and again find their way to his ears, but the sound of his own voice had brought with it the accustomed charm, and he ran on from platitude to truism, and from truism back to platitude, with an eloquence ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... with an insignificant remark which led both into a maze of meaningless but infinitely diverting inconsequences; diverting, at least, to Anisty, who held up his head, giving her back look for look, jest for jest, platitude for platitude (when the waiter was within hearing distance): altogether, he felt, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... despised!" he continued in a very loud tone of voice, and drawing himself up close to Raskolnikoff, whom he stared out of countenance. The incessant repetition of the statement that quarters provided by the State were by no means to be despised contrasted singularly, by its platitude, with the serious, profound, enigmatical look he now cast on ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... period he betrays the fatal defect which remains with him through life, the indulgence in 'the luxury of noble sentiments,' and the easy and irritating Micawber-like genteel roll with which he turns off a moral platitude or finely vague sentiment, in the belief that good principles constitute good character. 'As our minds improve in knowledge,' he writes, 'may the sacred flame still increase until at last we reach the glorious world above when we shall never ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... of the Anatomy of Wit is taken up with what may be described as the private papers of Euphues, consisting of letters, essays, and dialogues, including A Cooling Carde for all Fond Lovers, a treatise on education, and a refutation of atheism, and so amid the thunders of the artillery of platitude the first ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... to muster the same old property Smile every time that Charley Bromide or old Mr. Platitude lifted a shell of sparkling Vinegar and fervently ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... without breaking eggs," was the responsive platitude from Herman Krech. "I suppose you mean you're going to start in ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... which, until Socrates taught, had but little bearing upon action, were the dominant subjects; while knowledge aiding the arts of life had a very subordinate place. And in our own universities and schools at the present moment, the like antithesis holds. We are guilty of something like a platitude when we say that throughout his after-career, a boy, in nine cases out of ten, applies his Latin and Greek to no practical purposes. The remark is trite that in his shop, or his office, in managing his estate or his family, in ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... were anywhere to be had. Truth is, the Prussian Dryasdust, otherwise an honest fellow, and not afraid of labor, excels all other Dryasdusts yet known; I have often sorrowfully felt as if there were not in Nature, for darkness, dreariness, immethodic platitude, anything comparable to him. He writes big Books wanting in almost every quality; and does not even give an INDEX to them. He has made of Friedrich's History a wide-spread, inorganic, trackless matter; dismal to your mind, and barren as a ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... they must not be inexact or incomprehensive, sweep too wide, and the poet is not held within them; and out of the mere describer's range and capture he may escape by as many doors as there are outlets from a forest. But much ready-made platitude brings about the world's guesses at a poet, and false and flat thought lies behind its epigrams. It is not long since the general guess-work assigned melancholy, without authority, to a poet lately deceased. Real poets, it was said, are unhappy, and this was ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... because he loves Mrs. Gallup or human sacrifice; but he cannot choose to fail because he loves success. When the test of triumph is men's test of everything, they never endure long enough to triumph at all. As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... can mitigate. These tempered and conditional truths are not in nature, which decrees, with uncompromising dogmatism, that either a woman is one's mother, or she is not. The writer probably meant merely that "fear is one of the causes of cruelty," and had he used a colourless abstract word the platitude might pass unchallenged. But a vague desire for the emphasis and glamour of literature having brought in the word "mother," has yet failed to set the sluggish imagination to work, and a word so glowing with picture and vivid with sentiment is damped and dulled by the thumb-mark ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... brings me to the other platitude. How often we are told, "Women themselves do not want it; when they do it will be given to them." That is to say, when an overwhelming majority of women want what they ought to have, then they can have ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
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